En un pozo de lumbre. Estudios sobre Carmen Conde (review)

Carmen Conde (1907–1996) began writing at a young age, but she really belongs to the first generation of Spanish poets to emerge after the Civil War. Her work, however, has received considerably less attention than that of Gabriel Celaya or Blas de Otero, for example, and this volume goes a significant way towards remedying this critical deficiency. Her first book was, in fact, published in 1930, but it was only with Ansia de gracia (1945) that she began to gain wider recognition. Critics have often emphasized the importance of motherhood in her work (and there is an essay on the theme in this volume), a theme developed through the poetic maternalization of her ancestors and intimately connected with her own experience of motherhood. The mother becomes an image of strength, and Eve develops into a metaphor to challenge homocentric values, as in Mujer sin Edén (1947), which subverts the traditional biblical story. Not surprisingly, her work has been of considerable interest to feminist critics, yet her feminism is clearly compatible with marriage, an acceptance of religious belief and faith in God. This new collection of essays arguably provides a much richer analysis than hitherto of the diverse facets of her work. Active in the public sphere, she founded, along with her husband, the Universidad Popular de Cartagena during the Republic, and in 1978 she became the first woman to be elected to the Real Academia Española.

En un pozo de lumbre, edited by two distinguished Hispanists from the University of Murcia, contains eighteen essays, mainly by Spanish critics working in Spain, but also from Europe and the United States, which range over her poetry (to which the majority of essays are dedicated), prose narrative, autobiography, her writing for children, her early theatre, the feminist significance of her writing, as well as literary influences, contexts and relations. All these essays are of considerable interest. Inevitably, however, it is not possible in the space of this short review to do justice to them all, and this reviewer's choice should not be construed as a statement of value, merely as a reflection of his own interests. Suffice it to say that the editors are to be congratulated on generating and bringing together these new and very fresh perspectives on a writer whose work deserves to be better known.

The volume opens with a chapter by María del Carmen Alfonso García, which reflects in a fascinating way on the autobiographical volumes, Por el camino, viendo sus orillas, published in 1986, in an analysis which suggestively relates these to other aspects of her creative writing. Carmen Conde is an ideal case study for research into the very conventional form which is autobiography, given her marginal status both as intellectual and as woman. Drawing on and interrogating recent autobiographical theory, Alfonso argues that the form, with its preoccupation with the life of exceptional men, traditionally excludes woman, and that female autobiography is therefore, of necessity, transgressive. She weaves skilfully together a number of themes – history, marriage, female friendship, revelation and silence – and demonstrates convincingly that Carmen Conde subverts the autobiographical mode in various ways as, for example, by not imposing a pattern on the raw material of her life, and by blending different kinds of writing in an atemporal and fragmentary manner. This is a masterly essay, convincing in its general thesis and well argued in its detail, which will doubtless provoke a variety of responses.

It is instructive to link Alfonso's piece with Maria del Pilar Palomo's essay on Castile in Carmen Conde's work. This, too, is autobiographical in scope, in that Conde stayed in the Escorial with her friend after the Civil War when she was under threat of trial for supporting the Republic, an offence designated, in the semantic distortions of the time, 'auxilio a la rebelión'. Conde's reflections on Castile are born...